Diary Entries

TSoG&B: We (narrowly) did it!

We came in 0.04 points ahead of Balancer Of Circles and As Was Foretold. What a close call! I have to admit I couldn't try any of the entries yet. I left right after PyWeek on a 4-week trip with just a business laptop that is not right for PyWeek judging. I'm so looking forward to playing the high-scoring games and also some of the lower scoring ones that look awesome nevertheless.

Thanks for the kind comments! Sorry for making a "tarbomb" — I did not realize it until I read the comments... Also sorry about the huge wavs. Looks like I messed up everything that involved compression this time :).

TSoG&B: Voice acting

Ever since playing Shundread's The Catcher in the Strife, I knew how much voice acting can add to a game. Finally with so much dialog in the game we got to give it a try! The tricky part is that the dialog changes during the week as the gameplay evolves. So we left recording the voices until late — too late.

Most of the recording slipped past the deadline and was only added in version 1.1. Also it was all one take with lots of laughing at each other. It is tons of fun, and I think the result adds to the game no matter how ridiculous it turns out. I recommend you give it a try for next PyWeek if you haven't yet!

It would have been even better if everyone on the team would have voiced one character, but we couldn't get it organized in time. Well, there is something left for the future!

TSoG&B: Finish line

I spent the rest of the day drawing character portraits. While the finished drawings are not much more elaborate than the sketches, they took immensely longer to draw. Perhaps it's my "while not looking_good(line): undo(); line = random_line()" approach :). I had to take Friday off work to finish.All the while everyone else was working on design, coding and music at such pace that I could not follow. Would there be a game at the end in which these characters get to be featured? Or will they just float over a black background in the company of a few white squares? (This was the general design for a long time.

I was very relieved and impressed in the end, as over the course of Saturday the game turned playable and even fun. This is a really awesome thing about working in a big team that I had missed in previous PyWeeks. Code magically appearing even when I had nothing to do with it :). I hope my teammates will post some diary entries about this part of the development, since I wasn't able to follow along.

I also made rough 3D ships and stuff in Sculptris. I was aching to try it for PyWeek, since it's such a fast and simple modeling tool and I was not let down. The good thing is that even if you're not great at modeling, the end result will just look like a child's play-doh sculpture. (As seen above :).) It exports to OBJ which is easy enough to load.

TSoG&B: First days

Planning out everything had the advantage that we could immediately start implementation on Sunday. I threw together the skeleton of the game in an hour that had all the core components (in a non-working state of course :)), and everyone could start plugging in parts in parallel.

The downside of the big team was that I could not follow progress closely. Since I was working on other designs in the pre-production phase I barely understood what was the game we were making about. I thought I'd let those who knew more work on the game logic. The pre-production design was rather vague about the setting (the white wizard of Life battling the black wizard of Death) so I went to spice it up.I wrote a goofy script and sketched portraits for the characters. Game dialogs are not an easy genre. They need to be so short as to not bore the player that every sentence has to serve multiple purposes. You have to expand the setting, advance the story, explain the game mechanic and build the character with the same dozen words that fit in the constrained space at the bottom of the screen!

So I probably failed at all of those goals :). But it was a good effort. Players with a keen sense for detective stories may be able to work out the plot. Who sent the Kraken? Who was Tom working for? What the hell is Aunt Menace going on about?

TSoG&B: Before PyWeek

We were too busy to post any diary entries, but now I think we can go back and summarize how things went.

I basically mentioned PyWeek to everyone I bumped into in the weeks before the contest and got 10 or so people in the team. It was crazy. We came up with 2-3 detailed ideas for each theme candidate and it was painful shooting them down. Here are my dead soldiers if you're interested:

It was a lot of fun just throwing ideas at each other. We also tried to make warmup games, but that didn't go very far. (Just watch out, I'll finish Space Bear Cathedrals as warmup for next PyWeek!)

In the end we had to settle on one idea per theme candidate. This would surely have escalated to a knife-fight had we not worked through Google+ hangouts. (How do other teams do this? I wonder if there is a peaceful way of going about it...)

We then added even more detail to the winners, down to screen mocks and milestones! (See the TPS and the secret identity game above.) We thought we were ready for PyWeek! But were we...? Find out in our next episode! :)